What IDE should you choose?
As a programmer you face many IDEs that are special in their own way, I will try to clarify some of them in this post.
# JetBrains IDEs
I may be biased a bit because I tend to use them, but here’s my opinion on the different JetBrains IDEs.
Foremost, JetBrains is indeed paid, but they have a Student program where you can get a year of their software fully for free under the condition to not use it for commercial use. (The Application for the License can be found here)
JetBrains has a different approach towards how they manage different languages. (as of now, at least)
They provide a wide selection of different tools for different languages while also having some free versions that the community uses, here’s a list of all current programs from JetBrains:
IDEs
AppCode (Focus: iOS / Apple)
CLion (Focus: C, C++)
DataGrip (Focus: Database tools in one IDE)
DataSpell (Focus: IDE for Data Scientists)
Fleet (Focus: Multiple Languages; WIP; Early Access as of 12/02/2022)
GoLand (Focus: GO)
IntelliJ IDEA (Focus: Java, Kotlin; Has free version called “Community Edition”
PhpStorm (Focus: PHP / HTML)
PyCharm (Focus: Python)
Rider (Focus: .NET)
RubyMine (Focus: Ruby)
WebStorm (Focus: TypeScript / JavaScript)
There are many other tools like dotNet tool set and ReSharper an extension for Visual Studio which makes .NET and C++ even better to use it there CLion might be not so feature packed as Visual Studio is.
Overall, there are many cool features like additional language support via extensions and many themes for the different IDEs that are the same everywhere or the option to preview HTML files within the browser or live via a local server.
But they have a big issue that might be unappealing for someone, they tend to be more performance heavy than VSCode does.
Besides that flaw, they are really neat with most features you expect from an IDE in the respective language like ESLint support in WebStorm or Maven / Gradle support in Java.
Also, small fun fact Android Studio is the same as a JetBrains IDE, but it’s owned by google but made by JetBrains.
#2 Visual Studio
Microsoft’s IDE Visual Studio that has been around 19.03.1997, so you can see it like the big brother of VS Code.
It has different tiers, but it does come with a free edition that is more than capable of doing the most things you want to accomplish
It targets mostly Microsoft's own languages or mostly used by them like .NET (C#), C++, VB, TypeScript and many more, however unlike VS Code Visual Studio requires a somewhat better PC to run and only has support for Windows.
Furthermore, it ships with a wide selection of different application templates and has many helpful features like debugging for C++ or different small little tools like an icon editor for .ico files.
An additional feature being the wide selections of Workloads you can download, like .NET Development or C++
You can also use it for game development in Unity (Where it also comes shipped with if you install Unity) or Unreal or just create your own game engine
Overall, it’s a powerful IDE that features many dedicated features for different use cases, like attaching to a process to debug it or integrated NuGet package manager support.
It also supports custom themes and extensions you can get from the Marketplace, with the only caveat that you might need to restart Visual Studio to make them work.
#3 Visual Studio Code
VS Code is in theory not an IDE by itself but more of a fancy text editor, by itself it’s not a miracle in any way, but its magic lies in the extensions.
Found either included or downloadable in the official marketplace, baked into the Editor make the boring text editor into an “IDE” enabling such things as syntax styling and Intellisense.
VS Code is open source and can be found on GitHub, however it comes with some downsides, with some being that it’s maintained by Microsoft.
This means that there is a ton of telemetry within VS Code that gets send to Microsoft, however due to VS Code being open source there’s a flavor of VS Code that eliminates it with basically being the same as the original but with removed telemetry code called VSCodium.
The other one being that you need to rely on the extension to do the heavy lifting, meaning sometimes language specific features or task like maven for java might be missing, but in some cases the extension might be perfect such as seen in “rust-analyzer” making VS Code the perfect IDE for Rust.
Overall, it’s lightweight and can be used for many use cases, so I recommend it if your machine is either slow or you aren’t able the Student edition of JetBrains, if you can, I would recommend checking out Fleet.
Conclusion
Those different IDEs are unique in their own way, but for me, I would stick to using JetBrains IDEs due to their support and awesome community!
If you liked this comparison, make sure to give me a 👏 or give me your honest opinion and maybe spot some flaws I made while writing this, as I’m still quite new to blogging!